The School of Greatness - 1060 The Truth About Breathing & Why You’re Doing It Wrong w/James Nestor

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

“There is going to be an explosion of focus on breathing. There used to be. We forgot about it for 40 years and here we are again.”Today's guest is author and journalist James Nestor, who believes that the world has lost the ability to breathe properly and after spending years in laboratories, working with researchers at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions to figure out what went wrong with our breathing, he’s learned how to fix it. Lewis and James have a wide-ranging discussion on the power of breathing through the nose and all the positive effects it has on the body, immune system, mental health, and more!For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1060Check out James’ website: www.mrjamesnestor.com Read his book: https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/breath Check out Greatness Coaching: www.lewishowes.com/mycoachThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod

This is episode number 1060 on the power of breathing with James Nestor. Breathe through your nose all the time. I don't care if your nose is clogged. If you want to make your body a very violent place for viruses to live in, start with breathing through your nose, take your vitamin D and C. If you see teeth imprints on your tongue, then your mouth is too small for your tongue. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message

to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Oprah Winfrey said, breathe, let go, and remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure. And Terry Gilmets said, the wisest one word sentence, breathe. Again, my guest today is author and journalist James Nestor. James believes that the world has lost the ability to breathe properly.

And after spending years in laboratories and ancient burial sites, working with researchers at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions to figure out what went wrong with our breathing, he's learned how to fix it. And this has got to be one of the most fascinating episodes about the power of truly optimizing something which is as simple sounding as breathing, but how it makes a massive difference in your life. So in this episode, we break down the difference between breathing through the mouth versus the nose. This is huge if you're not breathing through the nose, how to increase CO2 in the body, how to breathe when you're dealing with anxiety and panic attacks, how to maintain and increase your lung capacity,

even through old age, how breathing affects our immune system, why the diaphragm is considered the second heart, and so much more. But before we dive into this, I wanted to let you know that I just launched my greatness coaching program. This is your high performance and big goal achieving system for 2021 and beyond. It includes science-backed coaching, accountability, community, and my new Greatness Playbook, where you'll reflect, plan, and create short-term actions on your long-term visions for your life. But whether you join Greatness Coaching or not, creating high-performance systems will be the biggest thing you do to set yourself up for success in 2021 and beyond. If you are already successful in your business or side hustle or

coaching and you want to take things to the next level, then go to lewishouse.com slash mycoach to apply and see if you're the right fit right now. As well as you're listening to this episode, make sure to share this with someone who needs to hear it. Someone that you care about in your life, that you want to see improve their life and give them inspiration and tools to improve with their breathing. Just send them to lewishouse.com slash 1060. And a quick reminder, subscribe to the School of Greatness. If this is your first time here, welcome to the family.

Click that subscribe button over on Apple Podcasts as well as give us a rating and review at any time during this episode. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only James Nestor. Welcome, everyone, to the School of Greatness. I am very excited. We have James Nestor in the house, New York Times bestselling author of his latest book, Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art. And I'm so glad you're here because I was in India about four years ago on a meditation experience, retreat, learning meditation, then doing meditation instructor training. And it was something fascinating I learned for the first time, at least at this place, that the monks of this facility didn't breathe through their mouth. And it was the first

time I learned that it's actually not good to breathe through your mouth. And they breathe through their nose unless they're speaking, unless they're eating. Maybe they'll breathe a little bit through their mouth, obviously, as that happens. But most of the time, 90% of the time, they keep their mouth shut, they breathe through their nose, and they seem to be happier overall in general. But it seems to me that most of the world, at least in America, breathes through their mouth. Is that the case in your mind that from all of your research of this, that most people breathe through their mouth? The estimates are that somewhere between 25 to 50% of the population habitually breathes through its mouth.

And a lot of us think, well, who cares? We've got a mouth. We can breathe through it. But very different breaths you're taking through those two different channels that affect us in various ways. What's a breath through the mouth do to the body and the mind versus a breath through the nose? One of them.

And then what is a day of that consistently doing for a body? I'll introduce my friend here at this time. Yes, I love this. Show me the science. I usually wait a while to bring him on. Let's bring it. No, you called him up. So for people listening and not seeing this,

I'm showing a cross section of a human skull. And so you will notice if you take a breath in through your nose, it has to run this gauntlet of different structures past different tissues, past cilia, before it makes it into the throat, before it makes it into your lungs. If you look at the mouth, none of that is there. So when you are breathing through your nose, you are humidifying air, you're pressurizing it, you're filtering it so that you can use that air so much more efficiently. So yes, we can breathe through our mouths. What a wonderful thing. We have a backup delivery system for our lungs. That does not mean you should be breathing through your mouth throughout the day. And this is something the ancients have known for thousands of years

and modern Westerners just have not been hip to this fact. Why is this not taught to us at a younger age to be nose breathers over mouth breathers? This is an eternal question that I've asked myself for years and years because the science is so clear that when you're mouth breathing, you're going to make yourself more susceptible to respiratory ailments. You're going to be denying yourself more oxygen. You can actually change the shape of your face if you breathe through your mouth. When you're young, the skelecature will start forming to that slack-jawed posture, and you will have this long face. I'm a great example of this, right? Because I was mouth breathing through a lot of

my youth and even up into adulthood. But there is more than 50 years of research on this stuff down at Stanford, which is very close to me. And it's indisputable. No one is arguing with this research. And yet go around and look. And what do you see? A bunch of mouth breathers wherever you go. I had Andrew Heuermann on recently. I'm not sure if you've been familiar with his work at Stanford. He's a friend. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And he was sharing some breathing techniques and the power of breathing for the mind and the neuroscience behind breath.

And he was talking about a powerful breathing technique, which is a deep, long inhale through the nose with an additional breath at the top of it. So a, where you can really, that's when you actually oxygenate the most of the body and the cells, I guess. I'm not sure if that language is correct, but you're opening up pathways and creating more energy in the body when you breathe that way, as opposed to through the mouth. I've been studying a lot of your videos on Instagram and the different work that you've been doing. And you've interviewed so many different doctors and scientists and researchers on sleep apnea, on human performance from breathing. I feel like a couple of things happened when I was a kid. I always breathed with my mouth open.

And I have one theory. Maybe you can correct me if this is true or not. One theory that my teeth, although genetics play a factor in it, my teeth became very crooked because I always had my mouth open at night breathing and during the day and working out. Is that theory true or is it more genetic that my mouth is messed up with my teeth? It's all those things, but oral posture plays such a huge role in this. And this is something that people are just starting to realize right now. If you look at our ancestors, they all had perfectly straight teeth, very wide faces, these very broad jaws. If you don't believe me, go look at a skull anything older than around 500 years old. I've looked at hundreds of these things.

They have big, wide jaws, big mouths. Huge. And these are the mouths, the jaws that you see in models nowadays. So about 90% of us have this retronathic growth, which means our faces are growing backwards, which is one of the reasons why our teeth are crooked, which is another reason why we have smaller airways, smaller mouth, smaller airway breathing problems. So we've known this again for decades and decades. And I had a hard time believing this until I went to the labs, until I was standing in this room surrounded by ancient skulls from people from Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, all over the world, all smiling back with perfectly straight teeth.

Gosh. My God, what have we done? You know, it's interesting you say this. I, when I was 16, trying to, yeah, 16, I had eight teeth removed because I was supposed to get braces. And they said that my mouth was so small that it was, it was clustering the teeth. And that's why I looked like Edward Scissorhands in my mouth. Right. And so I had these eight teeth removed and then I decided not to get braces, which is

probably the dumb thing. 20 years goes by, my teeth receded back. My top teeth receded back so that the only teeth that ever touched for the last 20 years were my front two teeth. My back teeth have never felt each other touch until about four months ago because I finally got Invisalign about a year ago and I've been expanding my mouth and my teeth out. a year ago and I've been expanding my mouth and my teeth out. And it's crazy. The more research I'm doing, I feel like I just did this to myself because of my breathing patterns, especially at night because my mouth was just always open and relaxed as opposed to shut. That was one theory I wanted to have clarified from you. Another theory, I listened to a doctor of dentistry tell me that almost all

disease comes through the mouth that we pick up. Almost all of it comes through the mouth, from ingesting, from breathing, all these different things. And the reason why people that breathe through the nose are usually healthier is because they're not breathing in the viruses or the disease that we might carry with the filtration system through the nose that catches it a lot more. Is that accurate as well? So the first part of that, looking at the mouth and teeth. So why do we get our teeth straightened? We get our teeth straightened because they grow in crooked. Why do they grow in crooked? Because they have a smaller playing field. They have a smaller mouth to grow in straight.

So the Western approach to this, and this wasn't always this way, is let's remove more teeth from a mouth that's already crowded. And what's going to happen? The mouth is going to get smaller. So as this mouth gets smaller and smaller and smaller, your airway goes from this to this. So all of these orthodontists, and I probably talked

to 20 of them, right, have said that there is this big wave coming and we're going to look at what we've done 10 years from now and be horrified. Wow. Because the physics are there. Small mouth, smaller, smaller airway. It's not too hard to get your head around. But the question is, what do we do about it? We acknowledge this problem. And your story, I've heard this a hundred times from different people. I've had extractions. I've had braces.

I've had headgear. My mouth is messed up. My breathing was messed up. You hear this from everyone. Breathing was messed up. You hear this from everyone. And it was pretty shocking to me to realize that breathing could be affected so significantly. Isn't it interesting that we focus a lot on what we eat, how we sleep. We focus on hydration, nutrition, working out.

But we can go a long time without eating or drinking something, but we can't go a long time without breathing the right way. And yet we hardly ever focus on the art of practicing how to breathe. Isn't it amazing that a lot of challenges we're faced with as humans, whether it be our teeth, our breathways, inflammation, the ability to our breathways inflammation the ability to uh exert energy in workouts or whatever may be are all affected from our ability to breathe or a lack of understanding how to breathe are we supposed to breathe through our chest are we supposed to breathe through more of our diaphragm when do we breathe how do our ancestors know this instinctively and we don't our ancestors didn't need to know this just like they didn't need to know this, just like they didn't need to

know the latest CrossFit exercise to stay fit, just like they didn't need to know what foods to eat to be healthy because they were living in a very different world than our own. Our ancestors weren't doing push-ups or burpees, right? They didn't need to because they were walking for four hours a day. They didn't need to avoid sugars or high-carb foods because they were eating everything natural and raw. So when it comes to breathing, we have this amazing organ called our nose, which dictates so much of how the air should be coming in and how we should be using it. It's harder to breathe through your nose, right? It takes more time. It pressurizes it. That's all good because

that allows your lungs to absorb more oxygen. You get 20% more oxygen breathing through your nose than you do equivalent breaths through your mouth. Why is that? So because of how long it takes, because of the pressure, and because of a significant release of nitric oxide, significant release of nitric oxide, which is in our sinus cavities, nitrous oxide. And it's not, um, uh, it's not nitrous, it's nitric oxide. So don't go out and, and, uh, you know, uh, get those little things that fill up balloons or whipped cream and do them very high. You want nitric oxide, which is the stuff that is released when people take Viagra or other sexual sex-performing drugs, so enhancing drugs. So breathing through your nose could make you more aroused. I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but I will say arousal comes with a relaxation, a parasympathetic response.

An orgasm is associated with a sympathetic response. We calm ourselves parasympathetically with slow breaths. We arouse ourselves with breaths. So you could see how whenever you happen to be coupling with whomever, your breath is following the arc of the experience in a lot of ways. And that's not by accident. Those two things are very uniquely combined there. You've been studying this for a while now, and you were doing deep dive studies as well before that, and water and things like that. This seems like this is something that's been fascinating you to research and understand. What have been the three biggest findings that you've realized that were kind of shocking or just big eye openers that you realized you were doing the complete opposite of,

or it's been impacting you in such a negative way that you've now changed in your daily lifestyle? I think the first one is breathing too much. A lot of us think that by breathing more, we are getting more oxygen to our hungry cells in our bodies. False. We're doing the opposite. And I'll show you what I mean by that. Right now, if you take 10 to 20 big breaths, you're going to feel some lightness in your head. You're going to feel some tingling in your fingers. If you keep breathing that way, your extremities will get a little cooler. That's not from an increase of oxygen, but from a lack of circulation in those areas. So by breathing slowly, you actually can increase circulation and delivering, deliver more oxygen to these areas.

Really? So if I'm in a, uh, a cold state, I go outside, I'm I go outside, I'm from Ohio and it's wintertime and it's cold. And usually we're like shivering. You're saying we should be actually slowing our breath in that cold state to allow us to get more oxygen or what does that mean? It depends what you're wearing. It depends how cold it is. It depends on who you are, what your fat content is in your body. But having said that, there are numerous breathing techniques that allow people to sit in the snow for hours at a time and not get frostbite and not get hypothermia. And scientists are still wondering, how the hell do they do it? You can see videos of these monks.

They put them in a Harvard Medical School researcher, put these guys in a cold room, put a wet sheet over them. They breathed in this way, and they dried the sheet. So within about- They dried the sheet. That's right. And this is all available on YouTube. It's available in a study published in Nature,

which is the most esteemed scientific journal out there. And there's obviously lots of studies with Wim Hof, who I know you've connected with. I was in Poland with Wim. I took a trip with the 13 guys that I sent there earlier this year and got to experience this firsthand with him and experiencing it as well. So what types of, so that's one thing that's uh you know this fast breathing uh is not the the way you should go in general depending on all these factors but more slow breathing uh to help you kind of get the oxygen through your extremities what's the next thing when you're working out a good thing to do is to practice breathing less so there's slow breathing and

there's less breathing and there's less breathing. And these are two different things because if you're breathing slow, but you're taking in a larger volume that is still breathing at your metabolic rate, but by decreasing your breathing, something called hypoventilation training, which is getting huge right now, you can mimic the effects of altitude training. No way. Yes. you can release more EPO, build more red blood cells, and all of these things. That's what Lance got busted for, shooting up EPO. But you can do this naturally. And they've been doing so many studies in this. Xavier Warrens in Paris has been doing studies in this. and various Olympians have adopted this breathing

technique. It's not fun because the one need in life is to breathe. So I've done it. Not fun, but it is amazing to feel your body compensating instead of having your fingers cold. Just everything is hot because you've just got blood pumping throughout your body. So pretty interesting stuff. About a month ago, I committed to doing my first marathon. So I've been doing longer runs, which is not fun for me. And I've been a, I would say a high level performing athlete most of my life from playing professional football back in the day to playing on the USA men's national handball team currently for the last 10 years. And just as an active person, uh, doing a lot of different sports, it's really hard to slow your breathing down when you are sprinting, when

you're running fast, long distances, when you're doing a CrossFit type of workout, is it healthy to, to slow it down when your body, your heart rate is pumping so fast and saying, I need to breathe? Is it good to say, okay, let me restrict it right now, breathe slower when it feels like your heart is going to pump out of your chest? What you want to be doing is be breathing all the time within your metabolic need. So you don't want to be over-breathing. You don't want to be under-breathing. But so many of us are conditioned to over breathe all the time. That's what I'm saying. Breathing less can be very beneficial. To want to be is efficient, especially in athletics, especially in performance. more energy to do something when you could expend less energy to work at that same level, which means you can push it harder. You can run faster. You can run further. And they've done studies with people who have been running marathons and looked at their heart

rates, mouth breathing versus nasal breathing. And one guy, when he was nasal breathing, you know, 26 miles, heart rate was the same the whole time because he was pivoting into his parasympathetic state. This is the state in which your body is allowed to use oxygen most efficiently. You know, as Westerners, we're just like cram it in, cram it in, throw out what we don't want, cram it in. You know that it's most efficient and it's best for your body to be working that it's most efficient and it's best for your body to be working right in line with its coherence. So right in line with its needs. You wouldn't get in a sports car and just rev it at every stop sign and just completely pin the RPMs everywhere you go. The motor is going to wear out, right? Our body is the same thing. Is there ever a time as an athlete pushing the limits that's good to breathe through

your mouth you would have to talk to my buddy brian mckenzie who deals with um elite athletes all the time i think once you get to a certain threshold to a certain stage i'm talking top tier athletes here right then you can start exploring that in your zone five, your zone four. But what he's told me and what four of the breathing therapists have told me is never work out harder than you can breathe correctly. So this doesn't mean when you're, you know, about ready to dunk on someone and it's the finals in the NBA, you can't open your mouth, just slam it on someone. That's fine.

What I'm focusing on is habitual. 90% of the time you should be breathing to your nose. Even when you're pushing your boundaries as an athlete and you feel like you can't get the oxygen, are you saying that if you're training properly, the body should start to adapt and be able to? That's exactly what I'm saying. And there's 40 years of research with Dr. John Duyard, who has proven that you get more oxygen breathing through your nose. So why do you want if, if, and, and breathing deeply, if you think about breath, okay, you take in a breath, it's going to go into your mouth. It's going to go into your throat. It's going to go into your, your bronchi here. But it takes a while to actually get to your lungs. So why would you want to your efficiency by 35% over breathing shallow. So, and this is something I was hooked up with a Stanford experiment with pulse, with

a pulse oximeter on a bike and pushing it as hard as I could breathing through my nose at a rate of six breaths per minute, which is about a quarter. And I said, I have to be, my O2 has to be just sinking now. It stayed the same the whole time. Six breaths a minute. We were, this was all through the nose. We were trying to find the breaking point of when I was losing oxygen, but what dictates that need to breathe is not oxygen. It is carbon dioxide. So in the muscles or in the blood what is that it's in the it's in the blood yes co2 is is what we off gas I'm blowing off co2

there right so if you were to exhale and to hold your breath you're gonna feel that nagging need to breathe it's not oxygen that's increasing levels of co2 so once you acknowledge that and understand that an increase of CO2 can actually be very beneficial, it changes your relationship with how you breathe. So we want to increase CO2 in the body because more CO2 will mean we need to breathe less? More CO2 will allow oxygen to disassociate from red blood cells more easily to be clear people with emphysema people with covid you don't need any more co2 i'm talking about healthy healthy people who don't have underlying conditions an increase of co2 including

for asthmatics and panic suffers has been found to be profoundly beneficial because most of us breathe too much which guess what happens we offload too much co2 and without that co2 our bodies have to work harder to get oxygen this is so complicated sorry you have to go through this process but but especially for a journalist, I never went to medical school, had to learn this stuff, but we've known it for 120 years. It's just few people are paying attention to it. When I do the Wim Hof method and when I'm with Wim and he's like, okay, let's do a few rounds and then breathe all the air out so there's no air in your lungs. And then you can do more pushups than you've ever done before with no

i guess air stored in the lungs but it's oxygenated throughout the body what are your thoughts on techniques like that for performance i think they're fantastic and i think the science is very clear on that whether or not it's wim hof method by the way whim it makes no claims that he invented this stuff right these breathing techniques have been around for thousands and thousands of years and it's no coincidence that wim hof method does the exact same thing as sudarshan kriya which does the exact same thing as pranayamas they all have you really breathe hold your breath or breathe really slowly and they go through these cycles so what you're doing there is you are offloading co2 you are uploading oxygen when you hold your breath that co2 goes up that oxygen releases into all your cells and you start all over again so um i found i i tried to do

whims breathing tummo whatever you want to call it, four, five times a week. I'm a huge fan of it. I see big benefits of it. And with breath work and athletes, trust me on this, in the next five years, it's already happening. There is going to be an explosion of focus on breathing. There used to be, we forgot about it for 40 years, and here we are again. If someone's only got five minutes a day, what's the best breathing strategy routine to just give them a boost or get them more intentional and grounded for the day? What would that be for you? Is it a set of cycles?

Is it a deep breathing? Is it a calm breathing? What would you recommend? Everyone's different. What they need is different. So this is why these blanket prescriptions for entire populations don't really work too well, except for a subsect of people. But there is a certain foundation of breathing. It doesn't matter if you're an asthmatic, if you have anxiety, if you're an athlete,

you can all benefit from. So these steps are breathe through your nose all the time. I don't care if your nose is clogged. If it's clogged, find a way of clearing it. You have to breathe through your nose all the time. I don't care if your nose is clogged. If it's clogged, find a way of clearing it. You have to breathe through your nose, people. The second one is to breathe slowly, to breathe less, of course, and to exhale fully. A lot of us are conditioned, this is very typical Western mindset, to put more and more in, more and more in, air on top of air. In order to get a full breath of air, you need to get the old breath out and you need to focus on your exhales and exhalations.

So a simple thing, and just because something's simple doesn't mean it's effective. Look at nutrition. The most simple nutrition is the most effective. After 50 years of trying to find ways of hacking out, I'm going to pull this vitamin out and put it in this powder. We're back at square one. Oh, hopefully. Just eat vegetables. We've been saying this for a long time. So breathing is the same.

If there's one piece of advice I would give to people beyond that nasal part is try to breathe in to a count of about five or six. Relax yourself. Don't challenge yourself. Breathe out to that same count. If you want to relax yourself even more, extend the exhale. Nature is simple yet subtle, and your body will respond to this. And if you have heart rate variability monitor, if you have a pulse ox, look at what happens to your heart rate. Look at what happens to your heart rate. Look at what happens to your

heart rate variability when you slow down the breaths and you breathe in a rhythm. This affects how we think. It affects the emotional centers in the brain. So it affects the entire body because of course it does. It's breathing. It's our most basic biological need. Why do you think we have adopted this other style once we, when we knew this 40, 60 years ago, hundreds of years ago, we've, we've known this, is it just a change in the society or something else? Well, some of it is anatomical. So we, our faces have fundamentally changed as we were just talking about earlier. That's part of it. So even if you focus on healthy breathing at night, you have sleep apnea, you have snoring because our faces have changed. Some of it is environmental. If you think of what happened in the Victorian era, people started wearing corsets, okay? Really tight vests, really tight belts. What happens when you do that? You can't take

a deep breath. Add to that pollution, add to that allergens, add to that stress, add to that working in an office where you're in a chair like this, and you're stressed out, and you can't take a deep breath, even if you want to. And you've got this perfect cocktail of illness. And if you don't believe me, go look at what's happened to people in the past 50 years from BMI to asthma to COPD. I mean, things are out of control and it's so common now that people just think, ah, yeah, I snore. My wife has sleep apnea. I, you know, sleep in another room. There's nothing normal about this. What's the best way to reverse sleep apnea? It really depends where your sleep apnea

is. Nasopharynx, oropharynx, hypopharynx. For a lot of people, this is an issue from, and I'm not saying everyone, I would never say that. Some people absolutely need surgery. But so we have this muscle tube, it's our, and all these soft tissues at the back of our mouth. When you just eat soft foods, which is 95% of the diet today, even what's considered healthy, yogurt, oatmeal, avocados, all this stuff is soft. All of those areas get flabby, just like anything else would get flabby. It's like a workout in your mouth, yeah. You need to work them out so there's this whole new branch of science called myofunctional therapy where they have these kids and adults do exercises with their tongues this is an extremely powerful muscle right and if it's not working out

it's gonna get flabby did you have a lot of sleep apnea yourself? Not too much. I was snoring for a little while years and years ago. I'm surprised because I've had extractions. I've had all the other problems. But I had numerous respiratory issues. I was working out all the time, eating all the right food. I was surfing. I was boxing. I was sleeping eight hours.

Kept getting pneumonia, kept getting bronchitis, wheezing, and was told like people just like, yeah, you're getting old, dude. This is how it is. I said, I don't quite believe that. So once I really learned about what's happened to our airways, basically everyone. And once you understand what's happened, you can figure out ways of fixing it. So for people with mild or moderate sleep apnea, and anyone can look up these studies online, these oral pharyngeal exercises, I'm not going to do them now because they look pretty weird. But they have had a significant effect on snoring and sleep apnea. Work out for your mouth. Why not?

It's free, right? What are they called? Oral what? Oral pharyngeal exercises. And I'm happy to send you a few links. Yeah, I got to check this out. Is there a benefit with practicing breathing through one nostril and another nostril for the brain, for memory, for health? Is this a thing? It is. And if anyone is not driving, I guess you could do this driving, but you can just take a finger or thumb or whatever you want and just block your right

nostril and breathe in through your left nostril. So there's been, and breathe in and out through your left nostril. There's about 20 years of studies showing that when you breathe through this channel, you will lower blood pressure, your heart rate will lower, and you will stimulate more of the right, quote unquote, creative side of your brain. Now, the right nostril inhaling through that has the opposite effect. It stimulates you, blood pressure goes up,

heart rate goes up. So there's this thing in yoga called alternate nostril breathing, right? That has you use these different channels to elicit different moods or put you into different states. How often should you be practicing this? Is this like a one minute a day type of thing? Is this every hour on the hour? You do this for a few seconds. What do you think is the best process? You shouldn't have to be practicing it at all. And I say that because going back to that, we shouldn't have to focus on our diet or exercise, but the modern era is requiring us to.

And what I mean by that in regards to your nose is your nostrils are covered with erectile tissue. And this erectile tissue inflames and grows flaccid, just like the erectile tissue you know where. So our noses throughout the day, when I learned this down at Stanford, it just blew my mind. One nostril will naturally open for about a half an hour to three or four hours and then gently close. And the other one will naturally open all day, all day long. This is happening to us. It's going back. Sometimes they're both open and then they both. So your body, like when you have a little congestion, sometimes it's on one side and it's like, it comes out the other nose, like five hours later, you're like, what's going on? This is the cycle in our noses that our bodies naturally do.

And if you think about how breathing air through these different nostrils affects our physiology, affects us mentally. What a fantastic thing that our bodies are turning on the throttle, putting on the brakes. Crazy. Back and forth. So if you're breathing through your mouth like that this guy you get none of this zero wow it's kind of like nature's night and day like one nostril maybe or like when the waves come in and when they go back it's like allowing nature to happen inside of your nasal cavity which affects the rest of your body and the mind, I'm assuming.

This is fascinating. Do you know how often that is? Is that like every few hours it changes? What's the rhythm? It's about every 30 minutes to three or four hours it switches. And once you know this, right now my right is more obstructed than my left. My left is a lot more open. Ancient yogis believe that all humans shared these same patterns.

And they did a study a couple of decades ago where they looked at people and had them gauge how they were breathing throughout their noses. And when the moon was at its strongest during a full moon and during a new moon, everyone was synchronized. No way. What do you mean? Like one nose is clogged for everyone or a new moon or something? Yes. This is crazy. More studies need to be done. Of course, this is one study. But this is why I included this.

This stuff sounded insane to me. But there it is on the National Institute of Health Library. This is fascinating. So how long have you been practicing this new way of breathing for yourself personally? So people think that since I wrote this book about breathing, I'm now just the badass breather. I'm just, I got it locked in. I'm no, I am a science journalist and tried to take an objective view of this. Yeah. I picked up a few tricks from the experts in the field, which I have felt completely transformed from, but I am not the guru to be disseminating, you know,

you have this problem, breathe this way. There are other people that do this so well. Having said that, again, this stuff is easy. This isn't requiring you to go keto. It's not requiring you to go vegan. It's not requiring you to run 10 miles a day. We carry our breath with us all day long and we can focus that breath and you will see instant benefits from doing this. Science is very

clear. Have you seen through the research and the science, people applying this new way of breathing or I guess old way of breathing, uh, that people are able to do things like cure asthma or other respiratory problems through a healthier breathing technique. Have you seen this? So I've talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of these people, people who had had asthma for 50 years, who had been on bronchodilators, oral steroids. If you stay on oral steroids for too long, it starts impacting your bones, which is why increased risks of osteoporosis autoimmune diseases i mean it worsening asthma it's bad news and again this is no no controversy

about this but what do you do you can't get off this stuff because then you'll die of an asthma attack so uh this story was written about in the new y Times about how someone, he was a violin maker in Vermont, just started breathing in this different way, breathing within his metabolic needs instead of over-breathing. Asthmatics over-breathe all the time. They breathe through their mouth. He was able to get rid of oral steroids that he'd been on for decades. And he was going from 20 pumps of a bronchodilator to, I think, two a day. And I read this in the New York Times. So this is not a sketchy journal. And I said, what is going on here? So I spent months and months talking to the top researchers

in this field. And a lot of people think that asthma, oh, I inherited it. There's nothing. It's an incurable disease. I can't do anything about it. I have to stay on these drugs. That is not true. If you look at the scientific literature and if you look at these people who have done NIH studies into asthma and breathing and what a huge impact it's going to have, I want to be perfectly clear. I am not a doctor. I'm not a breathing therapist.

Okay. I'm not saying go ditch your bronchodilators. No, I'm saying that you should, if you have asthma, it would be worth your time to explore how breathing can help benefit you, how it can help blunt the symptoms, but don't do anything per this advice. I just put that big label on there.

Of course. And what would you say are some best practices from your research when our nasal passages are congested? How do we, we can't breathe through your nose for five days for whatever reason. What's the strategy there? Have you, have you heard anyone share that? So some people, their noses are so messed up, they need surgical interventions. Absolutely. But for the majority of us, including me, I was a perfect candidate for surgery, right? Broken this nose about four times, basketball, surfing, like I'm a complete mess, but I wanted to see what my body could do. And I was able to restore so much of that damage

through breathing to open up these passageways. So a nice trick if you are congested is to exhale and you hold your breath and you hold your nostrils and you move your head back and forth. You move your head up and down until you feel a significant need to breathe. Then you calmly exhale through your nose and inhale again and then wait about 45 seconds to a minute and do that same thing over again so what you're doing is you're increasing that magical molecule carbon dioxide which is a vasodilator which helps to open your nose so there's a lot of youtube tutorials on this and uh it's free wait so so first close your nose then exhale or exhale then close your nose you can exhale then close your nose get all get all the air out of first yep then close your nose go up and down side to side then exhale more or then inhale you can inhale through your nose from that. Then inhale through your nose.

If it's still congested, just be very calm about this. Don't just calmly inhale and try that again. Patrick McKeown, who's been doing this stuff for 20 years, has a lot of free tutorials on YouTube. He seems pretty fascinating with his research, yeah. This guy is someone who had severe asthma, severe health problems, was getting no help from anyone, figured out how to breathe, now has zero symptoms of asthma and is teaching thousands of asthmatics what he did. He had no intention of doing this in his life, took a hard left turn into this world. So he's scientific. He's a great practitioner.

He healed himself through it. So it's worth listening to him. For those who struggle with extreme anxiety or panic attacks, it seems like more and more people are dealing with anxiety and panic attacks. What's the easiest way to calm down using breathing that you've discovered? Slow your breathing down. So there was a study about 10 years ago, NIH study by Alicia Murrett down at Southern Methodist University. She went to Harvard and Stanford and she gathered a bunch of different people who were suffering from panic and she just

had them slow down their breathing and increase their co2 levels i know i keep saying co2 but but this is this is the stuff people and something like 96 percent of these people a year after the study concluded said they were much improved or very much improved. The majority of them stopped having panic attacks because what happens when we're panicked? Okay, I'm sitting here with you. Oh, I feel claustrophobic. The more you breathe like that, the more you're going to exacerbate and hasten that attack. So when you feel it coming on, you don't stop and take a deep breath. You stop and take a slow and light breath into your lungs, right?

And control your body and control your breathing. And this is such a profound effect on people. And again, that study, it was published, top scientific journal, it's available for everyone. I find it so bizarre, and I should mention that my father-in-law is a pulmonologist, my brother-in-law is an ER doc, I'm a huge fan of Western medicine, but it's so bizarre that people with panic, people with asthma, no one's looking at how they're breathing, right? They're given these pills and powders and put on their way. And the science is very clear on this stuff. It can have a really profound effect. Does the mind or thoughts when we're in a panic or stressed or fight or flight moment, does the mind or thoughts influence the breathing or is the breathing influence the

mind? Great question. It goes both ways. So what you're thinking is going to influence how you're breathing. But the wonderful thing is sometimes you can't take control of those thoughts, right? You get nervous, you can't turn that off, but you can take control of your breathing. And 80% of the messages are coming from the body to the brain, not from the brain to the body. So just by allowing yourself, think whatever you want to think, but slow down your breathing to the way that you would be breathing when you're calm, and you will start shooting calming messages into your brain and just take control of those states. And this is something that Huberman has been studying for years down at Stanford, right? With the phrenic nerve and the way that the diaphragm moves, how that diaphragm moves

is going to affect the signals that your brain is going to get and it's going to affect how you're going to be processing things. How the diaphragm moves. So the diaphragm is this amazing muscle that sits underneath the lungs. The lungs don't inflate and deflate themselves, right? They need something to do it. So we have this crazy muscle. It looks like a parachute or an umbrella that when we breathe in, an umbrella that when we breathe in, that diaphragm goes down. And when we breathe out, that diaphragm goes up. So this rhythmic motion of this diaphragm, the diaphragm works as a pump. Some researchers have said the heart is a secondary pump. The diaphragm is the main pump. So when your diaphragm is going like this, it is sending panic signals to your brain. This is like red alert.

Things are bad. But if your diaphragm is going like this, this is sending calming signals. So it's almost like you could be stressed out in your mind, but the moments or moments you start to slow your breathing, it's going to send signal back to your mind that everything's better. You don't need to stress as much. So if you can control your body, you'll control your mind. So guess what Navy SEALs do before they go in for some black ops mission? Really intense stuff. They start breathing in a box pattern. Four in, hold four, exhale four, hold four. Four in, hold for exhale for hold for four in hold for imagine a box if you look at what's happening there you're in for four but you are holding or exhaling for three quarters of the time so the longer you hold and the longer you exhale the more you're going to be eliciting that

parasympathetic that calming response so these guys aren't going to sleep, right? They're trying to focus themselves to be the biggest badasses on the planet, right? To go take care of business in an efficient way. They can't have their brains just all over the place. What are you saying? Panic. They can't panic. They're dead. So this is a technique that anyone can use. I mean, the vast majority of us aren't going to be in that scenario, but we can breathe the way that they breathe and that so many other people do to focus our thoughts, to take advantage of our breathing, to take over certain states, anxiety or anger. Can you explain why the diaphragm is sometimes referred to as the second heart?

So the diaphragm, again, is this huge pump. It's almost like the heart is a sump pump, right? It's just doing all the other work, just the additional work. But the diaphragm is enormous. And as you're breathing in and out, it is pumping blood, okay? It is helping to pump blood, but it does something else. A lot of people view breathing as just a biochemical act, right? Getting oxygen in, getting CO2 out. It is a biomechanical act. So, when the diaphragm goes down, it also softly massages the organs, which helps us leach out more lymph fluid. So, it is the pump for lymph fluid. So everything in the body should be moving. You know, you can think about it like a pond gets scummy, right? And a lot of stuff starts

growing it because it's still water. That's not what happens with a river. And our bodies want to act like a river. Things are static for too long. Does not like that. That's where problems occur. What's better for the body and your health? Chest breathing or lower belly breathing? Like where is the diaphragm sitting? Is it in between the two? Is it a mixture of both? So a lot of us are chest breathing throughout the day. And when we chest breathe, this is associated with a sympathetic or fight or flight response

what happens when you get scared but instead people are doing this all all day so when you breathe like that a sympathetic response it's amazing this is what has kept our species alive it focuses us it shifts blood from less important organs to the heart and the skeletal muscles so we can like fight or we can run but it's meant only to be in that state for shorts a short amount of time so if we stay in the sympathetic chest breathing state for too long we are cutting off other organs and a bunch of problems can happen in those organs because of that i won't go down the laundry list just trust me on this so to answer your question you want to breathe lightly fluidly and deeply this does not mean you have to

just go for it every breath and push out your stomach It means you should be breathing through your nose. Nasal breathings are deeper, okay? These go to the lower lobes. At the bottom of the lungs is where we have the largest perfusion of blood. So that's where oxygen exchange can happen much more efficiently. So light, slow, and deep. That's how we should be breathing.

And less. Ordinarily, you would say, breathe in line with your metabolic needs. But I'm saying for the vast majority, less is that's your metabolic. Gotcha. And is it true that our lungs get smaller as we age? And if so, can breathing practices prevent this from allowing us to have more expansive lungs? allowing us to have more expansive lungs. So what happens from ages around 30 to 50, you're going to lose about 15 to 16% of your lung capacity. Oh man, after 50, it just goes down

very, very quickly. That sucks. The problem, well, there's good news behind this. I'm going to depress you, then I'm going to inspire you. So the problem is our ribs get a lot less flexible. Our intercostals get less flexible. But what's great about this is you can reverse that damage. Guess what yoga does? I'm going to have you reach your arm like this, breathe into this lung and be flexible. And now breathe into this lung and be flexible and now breathe into this lung. So yoga is essentially just allowing us not only to maintain our lung capacity, but increase it. I've worked with free divers who

have doubled their lung capacity. So doubled average adult male, six liters. This guy had 12 liters. So I think he had, he was abnormally large. I won't say quite doubled, maybe 40, you know, 70% larger. So it's not uncommon to increase your lung capacity 30% by, by, um, including these exercises by breathing properly. And especially when we get older, this is so important. We don't want to go down that entropy, right? And we at least want to sustain it. If we can increase it, great. What's the benefit to increasing our lung capacity? It's the same benefit of having a larger gas tank in a car, right? So if you're driving cross country, do you want to stop and fill up every hour or do you want to stop and fill up every six hours right by having larger lungs allows you to take fewer breaths and to get more oxygen with

those breaths it's about being efficient so when we're breathing slower and when we're breathing deeply into our lungs at our metabolic need our heart can work so much more softly we aren't overworking it. When we're breathing twice the amount into our chest, just feel your heart rate when you do that. The heart hates this. Why do you want to overwork your heart? It should just be doing what it needs to do, not compensating for your bad habits. And that's what this larger lung capacity, this softer, lower breathing allows you to do. Is there anything that you've learned and that doctors or scientists are saying is essential for us as human beings to practice that you don't practice?

For instance, I know sugar is horrible. I know it's the root of all evil in the body and developing cancers and all these things, but I love sugar. You know, I'm better at it. The more I know it's the root of all evil in the body and developing cancers and all these things, but I love sugar. You know, I'm better at it. The more I know how horrible it is for me, I'm better at balancing that, but I still love the sugar. Is there anything that you're like, these things I should never do, but I still do it because it's just a bad habit. Well, you're talking to a guy who just had a big old chunk of chocolate before I hopped

off. Good thing you don't have it. Good thing you're not with me right now because I'd be sharing that with you. I'm with you on that. I think it's a little ironic in a lot of wellness circles. People are so stressed out about doing the right thing all the time that they're miserable. To me, the point of wellness is to live a happier and longer life. So why do you want to spend all your time beating yourself up for eating a piece of chocolate or drinking a beer? So I think in moderation is key. These breathing practices like Wim Hof method, Sudarshan Kriya, they've been found to be so effective for people with autoimmune problems, asthma, anxiety, depression.

But just breathing those slow and easy breaths, there's so many benefits to that. And psychologists and psychiatrists have used this for people with anxiety and depression as well. So having said that, as long as you have this foundation of healthy breathing, just like with diet, as long as you have this foundation of healthy breathing, just like with diet, as long as you have a foundation where you're eating a lot of vegetables, right? You're not eating a lot of highly processed carbs or not too much sugar.

You can have a piece of cake. You can drink a beer. You can have a glass of wine. That's all fine. The same thing with breathing. If you're laughing really hard and you're breathing out of your mouth, who would tell you that's a bad thing, right? I'm talking about the habits, habitual breathing, the 90% of the day, even 80% of the day. If you adhere to healthy habits there, it's going to have a downstream positive effect on your health. And the science, the studies, the data has really shown us that. I was just trying to practice this as I was listening to you. Is there a way to communicate and speak, but also breathe through your nose? Like while you're having a long speech for an hour on stage, do we practice breathing through the nose or out of the nose while you're speaking?

I'm not even sure. Is that possible? There is, but it's so awkward. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. When I was talking to these breathing therapists, some of these people on the phone, I thought like they had some problems with their brain because they would say this very fluid sentence and they would keep talking and they're still talking. They're still talking. Then they would go silent and go, and now I'm going to talk some more and talk some more. So it's not natural. Yeah. If I did that on a radio interview or with you, it would be a fricking disaster. So as you can see, I'm breathing through my mouth, right? I'm trying to breathe through my nose when I'm listening,

but these aren't healthy breathing habits, but I'm aware of it so that when I'm off this call, I can go and close my mouth and breathe through my nose the rest of the time. So to answer your question, there is a proper way of doing this, but good luck with your friends. Yeah, right. Unless you're all breathing experts and you're part of the same language. And I've talked to circles of the conversations are really trippy it's like get a point across it's like come on it's like someone gave you nitrous oxide i knew on nitrous oxide was going to come back into that so that's hilarious is there any evidence thus far if training your breathing helps to fight or reduce symptoms for viruses, flu, COVID, anything that could be affecting the

immune system and weakening it in a certain way. I just talked to David, Dr. Hascom about this, who has been studying how different habits can help defend our bodies better against COVID. I don't think he's too pumped for this herd immunity thing. He said, our best line of defense is ourselves. And so they have looked at how breathing plays this role in inflammation. So inflammation is behind, show me the top 10 killers in the world. And I guarantee inflammation is behind 90%, even 95% of them. So how we breathe affects inflammation in the body. If we are stressed out right now and you know how we did that heavy breathing exercise and you felt some numbness in your fingers, that is inflammation. Okay. That is blood not getting to these areas. So,

so our arteries are becoming inflamed. so it's harder for blood to push through these places that's that's what it is so breathing absolutely plays a role in this and i should also note that there's been a ton of research looking into nasal breathing and how that is your first line of defense against covid no way not only does the nose filter out pathogens and bacteria and viruses but dr lewis ignaro who won the noble prize in the 90s has found that that release of nitric oxide interacts directly with viruses to kill them so no way yes breathing out through the nose is that what that does breathing through your nose at the whole the whole time okay in and out so not not only is this is this filtering because we have nasal hairs we have cilia we have all these other structures

but the release of this nitric oxide the first round SARS, which was like 14 years ago, they would expose mammalian cells to nitric oxide and those cells would live so much longer. And it's no coincidence, there are 11 clinical trials right now looking into giving patients, guess what, nitric oxide to help them defeat COVID and to blunt the symptoms of COVID after it happens. We produce nitric oxide in our noses. So we don't produce it in our mouth. We produce it throughout our bodies, but we get a much larger perfusion through our noses. Our mouth specifically is not producing any nitric oxide. So if you hum and if you hum on occasion, you increase your nitric oxide 15 fold. Wait, so humming.

Why? Just because you have your mouth closed and you're breathing through your nose. It releases more nitric oxide, the vibrations of it. So they found this out 10 years ago, 12 years ago. And there's even been this one small study where this guy had uh chronic sinusitis and he hummed at a prescribed time four times a day and he was able to clear his nose i'm not saying i'm not saying this is going to work for everyone but i'm saying that the science is there if you look at what nitric oxide interacts directly with pathogens to kill them.

Okay. That's our whole job. It's a basso dilator. It's part of what it does. Remember, it's also Viagra. When someone takes Viagra, they release more nitric oxide, which allows you know what to happen, you know where. So they release it. I mean, they're getting it out of their body. They're releasing it inside their body.

They're releasing more nitric oxide within. It stimulates the release of more nitric oxide. Inside the blood. That's right. That's right. You're not breathing out nitric oxide. You're breathing out carbon, right? You breathe out carbon dioxide.

That's right. It's really hard to hum and inhale. They were looking at humming and exhalation. And it's also important to note that nitric oxide has a bioavailability of about two to six seconds. So you have to constantly keep producing it, which is why you need to constantly, it really helps to constantly be breathing through your nose. Not just, I'm going to breathe through my nose for five minutes and fight off COVID. No, this is something you have to do all the time. If you want to make your body a very violent place for viruses to live in, I would argue,

start with breathing through your nose, take your vitamin D and C. Let's say we have our mouth shut 90% of the time, right? Hopefully more throughout the day. You're sleeping with your mouth shut. You know, it's interesting when I started to sleep without my mouth shut, I stopped snoring. You can't snore with your mouth shut. You can't go. I mean, I guess you could, but it's like your body just learns how to breathe through the nose as opposed to just your tongue flapping around in the back of your mouth i guess right i mean you you can snore when you have issues with your with your nasopharynx people can some people can do that but for a lot of people simply shutting their mouth at night can open the airway and you won't snore.

That's it. You just shut your mouth and you stop snoring most of the time. Moms have been saying this crap for 300 years. Sit up straight and shut your mouth. Maybe they were right. I know, right? It's interesting. When I went to India four years ago to study this, we were practicing a meditation breathing, you know, cycle. And they were telling us the science behind each one of the reasons why we would hum for a period of time, why it was all breathing through the nose, why you breathe in, let's say, for two seconds and you always breathe out for four seconds or you double the breath on the in the exhale and they were saying this is what we've been doing in this practice for thousands of years in india but they were finding the science that then backs the reasons why each thing is valuable and they were saying to me that when you hum it releases more uh what is it nitric oxide is that what's called

that's it yeah and it helps release that, which defends against disease, all these different things. So it's fascinating that people have been doing this for thousands of years, and now the science is catching up to it all. Well, think about prayers, right? There was a study done about 20 years ago where they looked at the Catholic prayer cycle of the Rosary, Ave Maria, and they looked at O Money, Padme Hum, one of the most famous Buddhist prayers, right? Each of these prayers requires you to recite a phrase that takes about six seconds. So you're only exhaling when you're reciting, when you're vocalizing, always on the exhale. And then it was about a six-second break to inhale. So, so many prayers, sata, nama, the same exact thing.

All of these prayers in these different cultures had the same respiratory rate tied into it. And it turns out that that respiratory rate, you don't need to pray to do this. You can, and that's great. But just breathing at that rate will increase oxygen to your brain. It will slow your heart rate. It will increase circulation. And the systems of your body will enter the state of coherence. And you can see this with heart rate variability.

All those lines that are disjointed suddenly become these beautiful sine waves. And this is your body really working at peak efficiency. So if you look at humming too, guess what happens when you go, all of these prayers, not all of them, many prayers in different cultures, incorporate elements of humming, which all do the same thing.

Chanting, humming. Yeah. I guess you're saying that this, when you breathe your nose, it, it create, it releases more nitric oxide in the

blood. You have to keep doing it. It's not like you do it for five minutes and it's there all day. You have to continually do this to keep releasing. Is that right? That's correct. But if you're, for instance, let's say you're exposed to someone and they're coughing and they look sick, this would be a good time to be breathing through the nose, to be humming, right? To get away from them. Because if this nitric oxide only lasts so long, it's that time when the virus comes in, which can come into your body and make you sick. So that would be the time you would really want that extra plug of nitric oxide. Boost boost and so your body isn't releasing it when you breathe through your mouth but it releases it when you breathe through your nose nitric oxide is released in various areas of the body but it is not released in your mouth specifically so you get a far you

get six times more nitric oxide breathing through your nose and if you're doing it throughout the whole day through your nose you're constantly boosting your immune system i And if you're doing it throughout the whole day through your nose, you're constantly boosting your immune system. I'm assuming you're constantly optimizing relaxation. You're less stressed by doing all this, right? Everything you're saying, it affects your nervous system function. It affects your brain. It affects your biochemistry. I mean, I can go on and on. How much of a change have you made in your personal life since researching and studying this? Do you feel like you're 50% of the way there? Are you 80%? What's your personally, your lifestyle like? Well, I wanted to address, it's pretty easy to

tell people how to breathe well. It's another thing to teach them why they need to breathe well or what it's doing to their bodies. So that's what I really try to focus on in the book because I was frustrated when I first started this research years ago, finding all these yoga books with 400 breathing techniques with these crazy names. It's like, cool, where do I start? What's it doing? So the how is really the easy part. But what I wanted to tackle beyond the breathing practices is how to enlarge my airway, how to stop from wheezing, how to stop getting bronchitis and pneumonia. So when you mean enlarge your airway, you mean your mouth, you mean your throat? What does that mean? talking the the uh oral pharynx in the back so the throat all those soft tissues but i was just curious um to see if you can expand your

mouth so we've we've done a very good job in our culture of making small mouths smaller you're you're a great example exactly i'm a great Now I'm expanding it through braces to widen it. And not to cut you off, the fascinating thing is they were originally going to make it smaller by closing the gaps. And I'm like kind of blessed because for 20 years I just had eight teeth. Well, I really had four teeth missing. They took up my wisdom as well. And I'm kind of blessed because I didn't get braces. If I would have gotten braces right away, they would have closed my mouth and pushed the teeth back to make it straight. And my orthodontist was like, if we do this,

your tongue is going to be pressed against your teeth. You're going to be speaking, might be messed up. You're going to be, you have no airway. He's like, we need to expand the mouth and put implants in. I was like, why did I get my mouth, my teeth taken out? I'm going to put a fake ones back in there, but it's kind of a blessing where, okay, now we've been expanding it and I'm hopeful that this will be impacting my health for many years to come because of it. Well, you just think of the physics here. So by you having a larger mouth, by having more room, there's more room for the tongue to naturally lie up on the upper palate. Okay. Instead of sticking out the sides like it does with mine, right? Because my

mouth was shrunk up. You're going to have more room to breathe. So of course you are. And the fact that I think it's just so bizarre that for so many years we've been shrinking mouths and now we're like, maybe that's not the best idea. Maybe we should enlarge them. So they're getting us going in and going out. So I did the same thing where I had seen so many case studies of people who had used this device. They just wore it at night, which gently opened up the upper palate. So there is a, if you have a clean thumb, don't do this with some dirty COVID thumb, but you can put it on the roof of your mouth and there is a crack, there's a suture, okay? That crack can

open at virtually any age and widen naturally. This is how when we're born as babies, our heads are this big, and then they double in size. You can feel all these cracks on your head right now. Okay? Those open up. And I wore this device to help expand my upper palate, and I gained about 15% to 20% increases in my airway. You did?

In one year, I took a CAT scan too. And you saw the mouth expanded? The mouth, there was much more gentle movement in the mouth. The mouth probably expanded, you know, about four millimeters. But just from having that, this also stimulated some chewing stress. So it worked out these back tissues and the back tissues just opened up. And subjectively, I can say I've never been breathing more freely. I didn't know I could breathe this way.

So a lot of people don't need their mouths expanded unless they went through what we went through. their mouths expanded unless they went through what we went through, but they can do these oral pharyngeal exercises, which can have a significant, significant improvements on your airway health. Is this a thing you wear? Is it just thing you press on there all night or? It is. And, and, you know, I've gotten like hundreds of emails of people saying, I want to do this. This is going to solve my asthma. I want to do this. This is going to solve my cancer. Everyone's different, man. And this worked for me. I'm not saying it's going to work for you, but I will say working out your tongue, there is no

bad side effects to that. Okay. What's one tongue exercise we can do? Oh, they look grotesque. Give me one. Give me one. All right. One. All right. At least crazy one. So first of all, this was a retainer I put on the top of my mouth that stimulated chewing stress and very gently opened up the roof of my mouth because it had been so small for so long. So oral pharyngeal exercises. Here's the easiest one. You see how I'm going to get around this. It's just closing your mouth. You want your tongue to always be on the roof of your mouth. You don't want it to be down below sloshing around on your teeth. All the time in general? Yes. Really? So you want to be

holding it up there almost gently. It should naturally be doing that. The front teeth should almost be touching. If the front teeth are lightly touching, that's fine. So you're going to notice when your mouth is closed and the tongue is at the roof of the mouth, the tongue goes up, the airway opens. If you open your mouth, the tongue rocks back in the airway gets smaller. So if you are constantly having shutting your mouth, I can't quite demonstrate shutting my mouth while I'm talking to you. So that is the number one thing you can do after that. You can do something that a myofunctional therapist just taught me.

You're going to get it now. Are you happy? It's stupid, but it's called the cave. And this is doing this. So I am putting the tongue on the roof of my mouth and I'm sucking it up there. Yeah. And, and don't overdo it. Start with a few seconds and you can do that throughout the day. And another one you can do. What does that do? What does the cave do? Do you putting that on the front of your teeth or more on the top of the roof?

Brian Smith, The front of the tongue should just be touching the back of your teeth. So this is strengthening the tongue, right? It's getting it more and more elastic and strengthen five seconds at a time 20 seconds, you can do you can hold it for for 30 seconds if you'd like. But another one. This is also known as mewing even though it's just oral pharyngeal exercises is using the back of the tongue and putting it to the back of your palate and sort of moving your tongue forward so that the tip of your tongue reaches the back of your teeth like that so from the back of your throat almost as far back as it can go and

then pushing it forward on the top of your mouth like you will feel the muscles right here when you do this and when you're doing this you are tensing those soft tissues you're just working them out and there's some other tricks i'll forward you the paper from yes guest journal which is an esteem journal this is where this stuff was published and very effective for snoring and sleep for some people with snoring and sleep do you speak uh spanish any chance james un poquito for 20 years i've wanted to learn spanish and one of my theories on why i think it's more challenging than it probably needs to be is because I've never been able to learn how to roll my R's. And part of me is wondering,

is it because I have a smaller mouth? Is it because I just, I can't use my tongue the right way? Is it because, I don't know, has this ever come up where people can roll their R's in a certain way for the language, whether it's Spanish or another language, based on breathing, strengthening the tongue, working it out? Is this something that you've seen? It's a great question. I've never been asked.

And I have no idea. Just from an anatomical perspective, it makes sense to me. If your tongue is not aligned with your lower jaw, if your tongue is flopping around, if you see teeth imprints on your tongue when you hold it up, then your mouth is too small for your tongue and makes you more apt to have airway issues. How that relates to languages like Italian or Spanish or Portuguese, I'm not sure. But a great thing. That's a good thing for you to research next and let me know if you find any research.

My new book. How to Roll Your R's. Are you able to do that? Just curious. Do you know how to roll the R's? I sound terrible when I do it, but I try. And you always get this sort of snicker of sympathy, which sort of allows you to get away with a bunch of stuff. So I'm a terrible Spanish speaker, but I'm in California, right?

And I grew up in Southern California. So we were just down there all the time. As long as you try, man, that's all they want. Gotcha. Just my personal curiosity. With the mask wearing in the global pandemic, is there a way to develop better breathing techniques to help people breathe better in masks? So what people are reacting to when they have a mask on is they're not reacting to a lack of oxygen. You see these people walking around saying,

oh, I'm anxious. I panic. I can't breathe. I'm not getting oxygen. That is almost always never the case. What they're reacting to is that increase of carbon dioxide. So when you have a mask on, you are breathing slowly and there is a little backdraft of CO2. And CO2 is the thing that makes us need to breathe, just as we talked about earlier. It's funny hearing people and even hearing people on the street who say, you know, there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen. I'm not wearing this thing. All you need to do is buy one of these. It's about 15 bucks on Amazon, or you can buy it at your local store, whatever. This is a pulse oximeter. And you put your finger in here and it shows you your blood

sats. Okay. There's been numerous studies that have shown no matter what mask you're wearing, I'm sure there might be some 20 ply mask that might make it really hard to breathe, but all the masks that most people are wearing right now, this is not an oxygen problem. It's an increase of CO2. As we mentioned earlier, having more CO2 in your body, as long as you have healthy levels of oxygen, can be very beneficial. We're just not used to it, so we think it's unhealthy. It can be beneficial. Yeah, it's interesting. And are you finding it comfortable when you're breathing through a mask? Is it not bothering you? What's your personal take on how you're doing it through the nose? I take this as an opportunity to focus even more on my breaths

and to breathe slowly. If you don't want to smell your garlic breath, if you've just eaten some pizza for lunch or whatever, then why would you want to keep breathing 20 times a minute? Why not breathe six times a minute? Really slow down your breathing and allow your body to calm down and function better. So San Francisco was one of the first cities to shut down. Everyone's wearing masks here. And I actually don't mind the mask. I'm a weirdo because I've checked myself. I've checked my blood sats. My oxygen's just fine. It's that increase of CO2. And knowing that there is extra vasodilation, more circulation with an increase of CO2, I look at this as a benefit in some ways. Is it possible to reverse aging

if we learn to breathe better? Can we become younger? Can we live longer because of our breathing techniques or strategies and way of being? You're going to be skinny. You're going to look great. You're going to get that leading part

in a movie. Everyone, all you got to do is breathe. No, really. It is one around. Is there science around it for living longer, though? Absolutely. There is.

If you look at lung capacity. So we had talked about this before. One of the leading markers of death is when you lose respiratory health and when you lose lung capacity, even more than genetic. So when they shrink and you can't breathe, how are you going to survive? Lung size is a very accurate marker for lifespan. Wow. This was a study they did about 30 years ago. Part of a longitudinal study that's been going on for 70 years. And they found that lung size and respiratory health. And it's amazing. Like you can't do anything about your genetics, right? But you can do something about your breathing and you can do something about your lung capacity. You can really

focus on that and show some substantial differences. What is the, is there studies or research around how many years you could potentially extend based on the size and capacity of your lungs? There's not because everyone's different. Everyone's a different age, but, but I, this was a pretty interesting study. I found it didn't make it into the book. My editor said, this is just too weird. But one researcher looked at people who had had double lung transplants and those people who have been transplanted with larger lungs significantly longer than what then people who had their original size or smaller significantly longer so those references are available for free on my site if you don't believe me that's amazing so okay so if you want

to live longer increase the capacity to breathe deeper and bigger lungs don't go out and get a lung transplant if you don't have to people we have this incredible machine called the human body that really responds to the inputs we put into it so you can hone this thing if you just spend a little bit of time, a little bit of focus. And I just wanted, I realized I was being a smart ass before. Breathing isn't going to do everything for you, right? Either is eating well, either is exercising, but it has to be considered with these other things. It has to. A lot of us know that eating crap food is going to make you feel crappy. It's going to shorten your life. It has to. A lot of us know that eating crap food is going to make you feel crappy. It's going to shorten your life. It's going to make you more susceptible to

disease. Same thing with exercise. Who's talking about breathing? Well, hopefully more people. Our ancestors were for thousands of years, but I see that wave starting to really come up now, and a lot of scientists and researchers are very excited about exploring this further. Is it expanding the rib cage that we need to do or making it more flexible so we can breathe in and out deeper? What is the thing we need to do? Your muscles like flexibility. Your mental capacity likes to be flexible. Your respiratory system likes to be flexible your respiratory system likes to be flexible your ribs want to be flexible your intercostals want to be flexible so if you look at these free divers these are people with these enormous rib cages right but they can also exhale all that air out right gosh

that's super expansive here's here's how you can tell if you're engaging your diaphragm when you're breathing. Because sometimes this is confused with just belly breathing. You see these people. They're just like, I'm breathing healthy. And they're just sticking their stomach out. Take your hands like this and place them just above your hip bones. Right. And take a breath in through your nose.

And you want your hands to move out. Okay. You don't want them to move forward. want your hands to move out. Okay. You don't want them to move forward. You want them to move outward laterally. And when you breathe that way, just real calmly, that shows that you're allowing that diaphragm to go down and gently push outwards. Okay. So that's a healthy breathing.

A lot of people are just focused on the stomach, but you're just using stomach muscles there. You want your, your body, just as I said before, everything in the body wants to be moving softly. Like your blood wants to be coursing softly through, through your veins. Lymph fluid wants to be moving. Muscles want to be flexible and they want to be moving. And I would consider the diaphragm the most important muscle in the entire body. Because if it goes out or if you are losing function there, everything's going to go to hell. Your health is going to go to hell.

Oh, okay. I've got two final questions for you that I ask everyone at the end of my interviews. Before I ask them, I want to make sure people get the book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. They can check it out on your website, on Amazon, everywhere. Best website for you is mrjamesnester.com. You're also on social media, Mr. James Nestor. On Instagram, you've got a lot of great little short bits there on Instagram that I really

like watching. So make sure you get the book. And one of my final questions is called the three truths question. So I want you to imagine a hypothetical situation that because you've mastered the art of breathing, you've extended your life for as long as you want to live. And it's the last day for you though. It's got the last day extended your life for as long as you want to live. And it's the last day for you though. It's got the last day of your life. It could be a hundred years from now, whenever it is,

but you've accomplished everything you've set out your life to be. For whatever reason, you've got to take all your body of work with you, all of your content and books, interviews, they got to go with you. So no one has access to your written audio or video words anymore but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true the three big lessons you would leave and share with us what I like to call three truths what would you say are those three truths for you that you would share let's say never underestimate the capabilities of your body okay if someone tells you something is impossible, go prove that it's not. And I think the third one is ambition is the last refuge of failure.

And what I mean by that is to sit around and try to do something and hem and haw. That's not the way to do it. You just do it. Then you don't have to have ambition. You're already on that's not the way to do it. You just do it. Then you don't have to have ambition. You're already on the train. You're already moving forward. Love that. Those are powerful truths. James, I want to acknowledge you for a moment before I ask the final question for taking a deep dive into something that I think is affecting billions of people around the world that don't have the tools and the science of understanding

this. I'm very grateful that you're popularizing this in a mainstream, especially in America, so that we can understand it more for those who maybe haven't been trained in other philosophies where they learned this growing up. And I think it's a lot of the causes of pain, stress, anxiety, And I think it's a lot of the causes of pain, stress, anxiety, mental disease can be solved or helped through understanding these practices in a major way. So I acknowledge you for studying this, for researching it, for finding practical ways for us to apply it in our lives. It's very powerful, the work you're doing. And I appreciate your work. Final question for you.

What is your definition of greatness? Flexibility. There you go. James Nestor, my man. Thank you so much for being on. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot for having me. Really, really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Make sure you share it if you enjoyed it. Again, think about someone you care about in your life. Send them this link lewishouse.com slash 1060 because you have the power to help inspire and transform someone's life today by paying this forward. It's free. Just send them that link or copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this on your podcast player. And if you are on Apple podcast right now, click on that subscribe button. If this is your first time here, just click on that so you can be notified of the latest and greatest interviews from the smartest and most talented minds in the world. So click that subscribe button right now on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review if you enjoyed the powerful information in this episode. When you do that, it helps us spread the message to more people.

So if you care about spreading the message of greatness, then join the community and help spread the word with us. And if you want inspirational text messages from me every week sent to your phone, then shoot me a text right now with the word podcast to 614-350-3960. Again, just text me the word podcast to 614-350-3960 right now, And you'll get messages every single week to keep you on track with your life and your goals. And I want to leave you with a quote from Gregory Maguire, who said, remember to breathe. It is after all the secret of life. And I want to remind you that you are loved, that you are worthy, and that you matter. I'm grateful for you for being here today,

for showing up, and of course, breathing with all that love that you have inside of you right now You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great